It really depends on who you ask and what day of the week it is. Depending on what's buzzing, any of a number of automotive marketing gurus will call SEO dead, dying, or on its way out, and yet somehow it still continues to deliver results.

What gives? Why is it that fewer companies are even offering SEO today, but those who do swear by it? Is it just a smoke and mirrors concept? Is it really that hard? Is it evolving too quickly? The answer to all of these questions is "yes", but there's also an asterisk next to them. The answers simply aren't that straight forward. Let's dive a litter deeper and discuss five of the reasons why search engine optimization is still alive and well in the automotive industry.

#1 - It Still Works... When Done Right

The asterisk attached to the semi-correct answer that "SEO doesn't work anymore" is this: most of the techniques utilized by automotive vendors really did stop working in the last few months. That has what has spawned all of the recent declarations in our industry that SEO is dead. It's not dead. Their SEO is dead. Great SEO is alive and well and thriving more than ever before.

Here are some of the things that truly are dead:

• SEO Automation. Vendors who are still building multiple variations of pages so they can automate thousands or tens of thousands of "content" pages are finding that their strategy is not only ineffective, but it can also be harmful.
• Low-Quality Links. Despite the SEOpocolypse of 2012 when Penguin killed off bad links and made them damaging to rankings rather than beneficial, there are still agencies out there trying to do it and wondering why it's not working.
• Boilerplate Content. So, your vendor says they build "custom" content. Check it. Do a search in Google for a paragraph or two that appears on your pages. Before searching, take out any unique identifiers such as the dealership's name and address. Does it appear that your content is truly "custom" or is it boilerplate content with a little uniqueness thrown in? Now, I am not one of those who preaches that every word on a page must be unique. There are indications that Google views dealer websites under a different lens than other industries, but it's still clear that truly unique content rules.
• Schema Cures All. No it doesn't. It's nice. It helps with proper indexing. It helps with proper placement. It is not the magic bullet that many (myself included) thought that it would be when Google started pushing it a few years ago. It's something that should be done, but if that's all your SEO company is doing, they're really not doing anything at all.

#2 - Savvy Dealers Still Want It

This goes back to the first one. SEO still works when done right, so aggressive dealers still want it. This is why so many companies are offering premium SEO services to dealers even when they don't know how to deliver it.

The toughest thing for dealers to do is to determine based upon presentations which SEO company knows what they're doing and which ones do not. I always point to Google itself. One would think that if a company is good at optimizing dealers, they should be good at optimizing themselves as well, right?

Ask for examples. Check them on Google for terms like "Automotive SEO". Just about all of the pitches sound the same, but the ones that are truly effective rise to the top and help their clients do the same.

#3 - Google Loves Proper SEO

The biggest misconception about SEO is that Google is against it. That is absolutely not true. Google is against blackhat SEO. Google is against tricks and techniques that are intended to fool them. Google is against cheaters.

True SEO has nothing to do with anything blackhat. True SEO is encouraged by Google because it's built on three basic concepts:

• Make the search engines aware of exactly what the website and each individual page is going to deliver.
• Make it easier for the search engines to crawl the site and understand which pages are most important.
• Deliver incredible content that their customers (the searchers) are going to find valuable when they visit the page.

Optimizing a site is not about fooling Google or Bing. It's about giving them the ammunition they need to serve their searchers. If vendors would stop trying to beat Google and start trying to give Google what it really wants, they'll find much more success long term.

#4 - Changes Are Almost Always Good

I mentioned earlier that search is evolving quickly. This is a good thing. It means that they have found what they believe to be an improvement in their algorithm or the way they present search results.

Do you know how you can tell a whitehat SEO from a blackhat SEO? When Google makes a big change, the whitehats get excited and the blackhats get worried.

They mess up sometimes. They always want the changes to be positive, but every now and then they put out a dud. Thankfully, they seem to correct their errors quickly. In 2011 I wrote an article about how Google makes changes to its algorithm every 17.5 hours. One would have to believe that the changes are more frequent today.

#5 - SEO Won't Die Until Search Does

There's a difference between SEO techniques and SEO strategies. Techniques change constantly, which is why so many companies in our industry abandon SEO as a valid option. The bigger companies have a hard time changing their products yearly, let alone monthly or even over weeks. Strategies, on the other hand, are only changed when the game itself changes.

The search "game" has only changed a couple of times over the years. One example is the rise of mobile/local searches, making the maps section much more important than it was just a few years ago. Otherwise, the strategies remain pretty steady.

SEO by its definition is about making it easier for websites to drive traffic from the organic sections of search engines. As long as there are search engines driving traffic to dealer websites, there will be a need for search engine optimization.

Changes are coming. It could be a year. It could be a decade. Eventually, search engines will die, at least their current use and situation. When they do, SEO will die along with them. Thankfully for my business, that day is not here yet.

Those who say that SEO is dead often point to the prominence of search traffic for a dealer's name. The reality is that the prominence of search traffic for a dealer's name is a result of bad SEO. If they say that it's dead, it's because they aren't capable of doing it for you.

I'm starting my third decade in the automotive industry. There are two reasons that I believe right now is the best time to be in the car business. The first reason is the massive amounts of data at our disposal.

The majority of the guesswork that once went into guiding a dealership's advertising strategy has been potentially eliminated. We can know exactly where people are buying cars. We can know exactly which cars they're buying. We can look at a state, county, city, or even a zip code and determine which vehicles were hot last month and which ones will likely be hot this month or next month.

So much data is currently being accumulated about car shoppers that we can get a view at any level - from 30,000 feet all the way down to the individual buyer - of what they like, what advertising venues influence them the most, which messages resonate, and which types of vehicles we should be marketing to them.

The predictive algorithms are becoming extremely accurate to the point that deviations from the expected results are few and far between when viewed through the right lens. We don't just know what and when they're going to buy. We can predict whether or not we need to advertise in a particular zip code or not based upon likelihoods of sale. This is potentially extremely useful to dealers who are spending a good chunk of their money going after customers who would very likely buy from them anyway if they didn't advertise to them.

We can even potentially track sales all the way back to non-leads. As crazy as it sounds, the technology is available today to determine what drives customers to your showroom even if they didn't fill out a lead form or call the dealership before coming in. No, it's not about relying on the up-log. The data can tell us what drove customers in who never made contact with the dealership.

The Second Reason

As I mentioned before, there are two reasons that I believe right now is the best time to be in the car business. An astute reader will have noticed that I emphasized the word "potentially" multiple times in this article. The reason is simple: the vast majority of dealers are not taking advantage of these incredible business intelligence tools.

Owning your market isn't necessarily about spending more money than the competition. Today, it's about spending your money with actionable data guiding your decisions. Today, we have a plethora of dashboards and reports coming from multiple vendors telling us that they're doing a great job and that everyone else is terrible. It has gotten to the point that many dealers I talk to tell me that they don't trust any reports at all.

There are two companies that are on my radar today to be able to deliver the goods when it comes to proper business intelligence that gives dealers actionable data. I'll only discuss one here today because the other has me on a journalistic embargo, but the other one that we love is String Automotive. They have taken the data-and-dashboard concept and spun it on its head to give their clients an incredible view of what it takes to manage their advertising. If I ran a dealership today, I would rather have a $20,000 per month advertising budget with String guiding it than a $30,000 per month budget without them. What they've done in recent months with dealership intelligence is absolutely incredible.

Composites and the Internet Sales 20 Group

We attend a ton of conferences every year and they each have value, but one of the things I love the most about the Internet Sales 20 Group is that they take the concept of dealership composites to a level I that is imperative to success.

Attendees of the IS20G get a comprehensive analysis of their current digital marketing presence from website to SEO, social media to video presence. It's a refreshing departure from the generic data given to dealers at most conferences. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, the IS20G steps it up to provide dealers with specific recommendations about their dealership rather than simple best practices that are somehow supposed to be universal in an industry that is anything but generic.

I have attended them all.

Understanding the unique data that drives your dealership's sales is the key to making exceptional decisions about the direction of your marketing.

Have you ever been on one of the automotive blogs or networks, seen a story that interested you, then quickly learned it's just a regurgitation from one of the other automotive networks? I'm guilty of doing it - posting the same content to multiple sites in hopes of getting it more exposure.

Then, there's the quality issue. I get really annoyed when I'm halfway through reading a post before realizing the content is either poor or it's just a veiled sales pitch about some vendor's product.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a place where only the best quality exclusive content could get published, where you know that what you're reading isn't going to be reposted somewhere else? If you answered, "yes", then it's time to celebrate. You're here.

Automotive Internet Sales is establishing an exclusive content venue where only the best of the best content gets posted. The AIS Expert Bloggers section is dedicated to vetted, quality content that car dealers can rely on to deliver the best practices they crave. We will still maintain our community blog section because the fact that people post to multiple venues doesn't make the content bad, but on the AIS Expert Bloggers section, you'll only see the unique stuff.

Tips, tricks, best practices, and even an occasional rant will be posted here and here alone. Bookmark this section and check it often.

If you think that you have what it takes to be an AIS Expert Blogger, feel free to drop me a line. We're looking for the best. If you're the best, you need to be posting here.

I'm a big fan of putting the power of targeting in the hands of the dealer. We're not one of those who believe that we know best about our clients' market, demographics, and customers and we try to put our expertise in social and search to play with their understanding of the area and their business to guide us to success.

The improved sourcing, data collection, and extraction of information about the markets gives us and dealers the ability to dive much deeper than ever before into understanding where and how to market.

We know the tactics. You know your area. Now, let's allow the data to enter the mix and we should have a winning combination.

We're starting to get pretty enamored with companies like String Automotive. After sitting on a few customer calls during their market analysis meetings, we've learned so much about how to spend the money and where to focus it. It has opened my eyes to this "third wheel" in a way that I never imagined. Perhaps there is more to data than just what we know mixed with what our clients' know.

Keep in mind, we are not a reseller for String Automotive and I don't want this to turn into a love fest, but I do want to highlight the importance of going much further into the numbers than I've ever imagined. That's the beauty of analytics mixed with DMS data mixed with everything else at our disposal (Polk, Experian, DMV - the data sources go on and on).

Regardless of whether you use us, String, or any vendor out there, I strongly encourage you to start going further with the numbers. For example, by cross-referencing your advertising spend by zip code with your own buyer data and comparing that to DMV data, you can see where the opportunities lie. Let's say you sold 5 Altimas last month in a zip code. This might sound great for some dealers, but what if there were 13 total sold last month based upon DMV data and you're the closest dealership to the zip code. Wouldn't that be disappointing? Shouldn't you either adjust your marketing message, your advertising styles, or your budget to try to make up the difference and start dominating in that area?

The data is cleaner than it's ever been, but the methods of analyzing the data have remained stagnant. It's companies like String that have opened our eyes to the possibility that we can make smarter decisions by letting the numbers guide us.

Social media emerged as the ultimate place to reach people when it first started taking off in the automotive industry back in 2009. Unfortunately, by the time that many dealerships and marketers started figuring out how to take advantage of it the right way, the rules changed to a pay-to-play model.

This is the best thing that happened for automotive social media. The spam once kept great posts from being seen has all but vanished. Now, those who invest a little money into exposing their message are rewarded with views. The only casualty - good engagement for high-quality organic posts. Everything comes at a cost.

All of this is fine, but the real value that dealers can get from their social media presence is actually something that very, very few are doing. In fact, we're finding that very few even know it exists. The power of unpublished posts on Facebook that utilize buyer data (as well as other forms of targeting) is where the true ROI of social media can be maximized.

By putting the right ads in front of the right people at the right time, you'll be able to drive real buyers to your website. It's the ultimate way to sell cars on social media and so few are taking advantage of it. Here's an example:

The fact that we're taking potential used vehicle buyers within driving distance of the dealership and sending them to the search results page of the dealer's website should be enough to convince you that this is the way to go. These are people who have indicated that they intend to buy a used vehicle in the near future.

Think of it as highly-targeted pay-per-click, except much cheaper than anything you can get from Google, Bing, or Yahoo. In this case, 173 used car buyers in the local area were driven to the website at $0.51 a pop. It's a no-brainer. Unfortunately, most are still focused on getting more likes to their Facebook page.

Of course, perhaps that's not unfortunate at all. Maybe it's a great thing that so few are doing it. I know that we're ecstatic that there's pretty much no competition out there for this type of action.

There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile.

Okay, so that’s not really original. Any opportunity to plug in a line from Gladiator, I’ll take it. Despite the overly serious tone of the quote, it plays well with the dream that was social media. The idea of having a set of free venues through which businesses could interact with consumers and the consumers could interact back presented itself as a grand concept to be desired and cherished. Unfortunately, the dream is dead. Success on modern social media requires one of two things: serious fame or cash invested.

Unless you’re Justin Bieber, your brand needs money in order to be relevant on sites like Facebook. There’s no other way to look at it. Even Twitter gets exponentially more useful when a little money is applied to it. LinkedIn, YouTube, and possibly Pinterest and Instagram are all heading down the road of pay-to-play if you really want to find success.

It’s not the evil plan of social media sites come through to their end game. In fact, most of the social sites outside of YouTube went in with the hopes of not having to apply advertising as a primary source of revenue, at least not in the formats they’re presenting themselves in today. “Advertising” was a dirty word in social media startup circles just four or five years ago. Today, they’ve accepted that their dreams of making money through networking and data are simply no long realistic. As their dreams died, so did ours.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the cost of playing the game right is, for now, extremely low when compared to the potential results. For a fraction of the cost of Google Adwords or display advertising, campaigns can be set up through social media that bring in similar results. In some cases, depending on the goals and campaigns, the results can actually be better despite the lower spend. Let’s take a look at the recent past, the way it works today, and the near future:

It All Blew Up

For better or for worse, the people muscled out the businesses. On Facebook, for example, the feedback from users was that they simply weren’t interested in seeing as many posts from pages as from profiles. They might like the show Game of Thrones and they might not mind occasionally seeing updates posted on their news feed, but for the most part they go to Facebook to see videos of little nephew Timmy sliding into 3rd base. Facebook obliged recently (and really, for a long time they’ve been creeping in this direction) and made it less likely that posts from pages were visible in news feeds.

There’s a silver lining to this, though. While users were not as accepting of posts in their news feeds from pages that showed up organically, they’ve demonstrated a tolerance for sponsored posts. In essence, they know instinctively that they have these services for free and that Facebook is a business. As long as they have some sense of control over what they’re presented, they don’t mind ads on Facebook any more than they mind television commercials. They tolerate them. At least on Facebook, they have the ability to let Facebook know which posts they don’t want to see on their news feeds.

Social media blew up. It got too big for brands, at least from an organic perspective. On Facebook and Twitter in particular, the feeds are too cluttered with personal posts to allow the business posts to come through naturally. That’s okay. We should be paying. If anything, this makes it to where the aggressive businesses can take advantage of the exceptionally low cost of entry without being muscled out by popular pages with their organic reach.

Today

Now that we know that organic reach is dead, we can move forward with the benefits of this. Facebook has done a terrible job at educating businesses about their advertising powers and Twitter has done even worse. Google+ – don’t get me started there. This is bad for them. It’s great for us. It’s great for companies that are starting to take advantage of it.

There are caveats, most notably that the ad types used to bring people to the table and try advertising are the worst ones. On Facebook, the “Boost” and “Promote Your Page” buttons are the easiest to get you started and the worst at achieving results.

Data. That’s the power of social media. Unfortunately, both of the basic types of advertising have trouble thinking about scratching the surface of the data components. This isn’t the place to go into details about how the data works, but suffice to say that it’s extremely powerful when used appropriately.

That’s today. Get involved and use the data that you have as well as the data that Facebook has. With that understood, what will the future look like?

Shifting Towards Mobile First

Everything is shifting to mobile.

Everything is shifting to mobile.

Everything is shifting to mobile.

It cannot be overstated and it doesn’t matter where you put the emphasis. Mobile will eclipse desktop soon for nearly all forms of internet browsing. It already does with social media. This is why, no matter what you think about social media, you must make sure that your digital marketing strategy focuses on mobile first and allows the desktop experience to happen as a secondary course. That’s not to say that desktops are dying or that they don’t need to be considered. They simply need to reside in a mobile world as if they’re big mobile devices without the touchscreen. Heck, there are plenty of desktops and laptops that already do have touchscreens.

As social media continues to evolve and mobile grows in eyeball share, so too do the advertising strategies need to match appropriately.

Social media is no longer organic, at least not for businesses. To move ahead, you have to either use social media from a defensive posture or go full force with the advertising component. The in-between strategies will do nothing more than waste time and energy.

For a decade now, businesses and marketers have attempted to decipher the jumbled mess of social media and turn it into a true ROI generator. Hundreds of thousands of Ponce de Leóns have explored the social media countryside in search of the ultimate prize - tangible benefit from social media marketing.

Thankfully, it's not as mythical as the Fountain of Youth. Most are getting minor benefits from social media as long as they're sticking with it and applying some basic strategies. A few are getting real results from the branding and communication components of social media that are achievable by nearly anyone who tries hard enough and invests a little money into the endeavor.

For those who are really wanting to make a dramatic impact on their social media presence, the key is in storytelling. This is hard. That's not one of those feigned discouragements that marketers often use to dissuade businesses from trying to do it themselves. It truly is extremely difficult to take the mundane aspects of most businesses and turn them into something truly special that people are willing to passionately follow.

With social media storytelling, it's not about telling lies. It's definitely not about looking for the thunder in a bottle that some companies have been able to find through a combination of luck and some viral secret sauce that eludes the rest of humanity; how many tried to duplicate what Oreo did at the Super Bowl? Lastly, it's not about manufacturing buzz where it doesn't exist.

Storytelling requires finding those creative elements that are present in any business (regardless of how mundane the industry might seem) and forming them into a strategy that yields a path to success. It only takes one sentence to describe it but one could write a book on the actual strategy behind it. We'll try to keep it shorter here.

The story itself can be about nearly anything as long as it's relevant to the business in some way. It doesn't even have to be a direct attachment. It can be about customers. It can be about employees. It can be the journey that was taken to arrive at a particular product or service launch.

Think about it like making a movie. It isn't about the end result of the movie itself, but rather the Blue-Ray extras and behind the scenes shots. Taking us through the process can be as fun (or more fun) than watching the end result itself. As humans, we have a tendency to enjoy watching things as they unfold.

A pretty good (not great, but good) example of this was when Pepsi MAX worked with NBA star Kyrie Irving to put the Uncle Drew series together for YouTube. The reasons that it was good is because it was able to tell stories that were interesting enough to get millions of views, was sustainable for a few posts to make it a series, and gave the behind-the-scenes view that we love. The reason that it wasn't great is because it had very little to do with the product itself with only occasional views.

A much better example is a Thai Pantene commercial from a few years ago. It told a compelling story and had all of the right elements but it did not let the product get in the way. In fact, you'll have no idea it's a Pantene commercial until the end. One thing that most will definitely notice is that during the concert, the main character has absolutely incredible hair. When the Pantene logo is shown at the end with the tagline, "You can shine," it all comes together for the viewer.

These are both big productions that most businesses cannot duplicate, but that doesn't mean that you can't draw inspiration from their creativity. The key is to make it last. It doesn't have to revolve around a video, either. A friend, , did an excellent job of using social media to tell the story of her new job. She had a countdown of the top 5 reasons to be excited about her new job. It kept anticipation high, friends (and potential clients) guessing, and showed that even individuals have the ability to tell the right stories about their business.

To succeed at social media marketing, businesses and marketers must embrace the right strategies and couple them with incredible stories. This post itself is an example of this as we will be rolling out stories of our own very soon for our clients. Stay tuned!

There's a disturbing trend I'm seeing in the automotive industry when I visit websites. Perhaps it's been like this for a while and I simply took my eye off the chat ball. When I see chat windows that instantly prompt for the customer's contact information, it makes me cry a little inside.

This isn't what chat is supposed to be about. I'd love to have that debate with anyone. Chat is an alternative means of instant information. In other words, it's more akin to phone calls than to anything else. If you believe in having a barrier of entry for your customers to chat, then you should have your receptionist answer the phone with, "Thank you for calling XYZ Motors. Can I have your name, phone number, and email address, please? No? Okay, thank you for calling."

Click.

I totally understand how this came about. Chat companies were pressured to generate leads and that became the only goal. If you, as a car dealer, believe this, then I would contend that you've either been misled or you've lost touch with what chat should really do. There are two parts: lead generation AND customer service. Some people call the dealership to find out when the parts department closes. You don't need their contact information in order to tell them a time over the phone just as you should not require their contact information to give them the time over chat.

Whether you believe it or not, here's a fact that common sense should tell you: you're making some of your website visitors unhappy by creating a barrier to inquiry. Some people (more than we all want to admit) will never give their contact information before coming in. Unless your leads have a 100% appointment ratio, a 100% show ratio, and your lead volume is at 90% of your total traffic to the dealership itself, this fact should be clear. Despite what the up-log says, your customers are not driving by randomly. They went online. They've probably been to your website.

With that understanding, why would a dealership want to put a bad taste in their customers' mouths before they even decide to come by the dealership?

Serve your customers the information they want online without prejudice. Don't force them to fill out a lead form first. A skilled operator should be trained to work with people during chat, determine if they're a valid prospect, and gather the information the dealership wants DURING the chat process, not before. Will volume decrease? Maybe. Maybe not. I am no expert but I would imagine that the people who come into chat that wouldn't have entered because of the lead information wall will be more likely to leave their information as their questions are being answered.

You don't just want leads. You want good leads. You want great leads. Chat should be the best of both worlds, combining the dialogue potential of the phone with the information gathering of a lead form. If you make them fill out the form ahead of time, you're pushing away many who want to have a dialogue first. This is a big mistake.

Some would say, "If they're serious, they'll fill out the form, first." BS. There are plenty of serious buyers who want information but who have had bad experiences when they fill out lead forms. There's a reason lead form submissions are on the decline. People have been burnt in the past. Get them into a conversation first, then pursue the lead when appropriate. That's the right way to handle it.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "Mr. Chat Provider - tear down this wall."

When it comes to marketing (and just about everything else), there are right-brained thinkers and left-brained thinkers. The right-brain thinkers are more subjective and often more creative and would not like the concept of social media having two options. It makes it too black and white. Left-brain thinkers are guided by logic and wouldn't necessarily believe that there are only two categories in social media marketing. In other words, neither type of person will likely agree with the assertion of this article, at least not at first.

One can make an argument that there are definitely multiple sub-categories, styles, and strategies that go into social media marketing, but there are really only two stances that businesses should take. These two categories can be called "outbound" and "inbound" social media strategies. They shouldn't be confused with inbound or outbound digital marketing strategies. In the case of these social media categories, we're being a little more straight forward than that.

An outbound social media marketing strategy is what most who believe in social media want to achieve. They feel that social media is a venue through which to reach people, communicate, improve branding, and expose the company's messages. Its goal is to be aggressive and take advantage of the fact that the masses are using social media regularly. In many cases, customers are spending more time on social media than any other digital activity.

An inbound social media strategy is very different from a pure inbound marketing strategy. It can be viewed as a defensive posture, a way of covering social media without much time or effort. It's about checking off the social media task box. This is the type of strategy that a business should employ if they either do not believe in social media as an appropriate marketing venue or they do not have the time and/or budget to put a true effort towards an outbound strategy.

Let's take a look at each strategy in more detail.

Outbound Social Media Marketing

This is an "all in" strategy. It focuses on the beliefs that lots of people are on social media, that sites like Facebook have the data that can be used for hypertargeting them with the right messages, and that either ideas or website clicks can be driven through an aggressive advertising component.

In the case of car dealers, for example, social media offers a venue to target people who intend to buy a certain vehicle in the near future. By taking advantage of this data and putting the right messages in front of them, dealers are able to pull people in from social media sites onto landing pages on their website.

To do it the right way requires an investment. It can take time to craft the messages, monitor the profiles, and participate in conversations. It takes advertising dollars to get the message out to the right target audience. Social media in general and Facebook in particular is a pay-to-play model. The old concepts of organic reach are dead.

Inbound Social Media Presence

You'll notice that I did not call it "marketing". With an inbound strategy, a business is simply creating and managing a presence so that they are there without putting in much effort. It's not a defeatist strategy by any means. For many, they have not found the benefits of social media or they're not ready to invest what it takes to have a strong marketing strategy, so they simply get their social media covered.

This is important because people will visit your pages and profiles. Most businesses have buttons that lead to their social media profiles right there on their website. The search engines will often rank social media profiles and pages high on search results for the business by name. Making sure that your pages have an ongoing flow of content is important while not being too time consuming or expensive.

It doesn't look good when people visit your social profiles and they haven't had anything added to them in some time. It's even worse when people are going to these profiles to converse with you or to leave a comment (such as a review) and it goes unnoticed. In extreme cases, Facebook pages can be "hijacked" by spammers leaving their links to unrelated pages. When this type of spam is found on a page, it can be worse than an embarrassment.

Why There's No In-Between

Some will balk and say that there are ways to have a good marketing strategy without going all-in. They are wrong. The benefits of a toe-dipping, low- or no-budget strategy that is trying to do more than establish an ongoing presence are no greater than a purely defensive inbound strategy. In other words, you can spend very little time and money on a basic inbound strategy or you can spend some more time and a little money on an attempted lite marketing strategy and the end results will be the same.

The gap between a basic presence and a "good" presence is minimal. However, the difference between a "good" presence and a full-blown outbound strategy is huge. If you're not going to go all-in, then you should focus on having a good presence rather than trying to work in a little marketing. It's a waste of time and money to go halfway. Either invest into it or keep it simple. There's nothing wrong with either strategy; they both have their benefits. Trying to be there in the middle, not quite bought in but more than just covering the basics, is a limbo that yields nothing more than keeping it all inbound.

It's a lot like poker. On some hands, you'll play it tight, particularly if you believe your hand is weaker than your opponents. On other hands, you'll play aggressive, even going all-in when the time is right. The fish in the middle who are trying to tiptoe through hands are the ones that end up losing their chips the quickest.

For the record, I am not part of the Dealer Synergy team. This is not my conference and I will likely get blacklisted by other conferences for coming out and saying this. However, it's important to me that the industry knows about the one conference that is truly a "must attend" for dealer principals, general managers, and anyone who has a vested interest in the success of their dealership.

I've attended every Internet Sales 20 Group since its inception. In the beginning, it was much like other conferences in that it was geared towards the digital personnel at dealerships. Internet managers, BDC managers, eCommerce directors and the like could come to the event and learn best practices that could help them do their jobs better.

Things have changed. It was most noticeable at the last event in Atlantic City earlier this year when around 200 attendees learned more than just "how to pick good keywords" or "why you need to be on Pinterest". Things really started coming together as the conference followed a theme. It wasn't a bunch of talking heads promoting their products. It was a truly engaging learning experience where dozens of attendees became part of the event, sharing their own best practices and molding the direction of the discussions.

It was at the last event that I realized that this event, while still powerful for the internet people, truly matured into the exact type of conference that dealer principals and general managers could use to guide the direction of their dealership. From the marketing composites that gave individual attention to everyone's unique situations to the flow of the event that kept an orderly but aggressive training schedule, the Internet Sales 20 Group demonstrated that it was different from anything in our industry.

We are proud to sponsor the upcoming event in Boston, not just because of the exposure that it will bring to us, but more importantly because we will be helping the leaders at dealerships come out of the event with a better understanding of how they will succeed through the rest of 2014 and into 2015. This is a competitive industry, but we're in a growth market right now. Some dealers are content with doing better than they did last year. For those who feel that success is never truly attained to its fullest and that there's always room for improvement, this is the right event to attend in September.

Today, using the “free” social media platforms as a marketing tool without spending money on them is about as useful as playing the first level of the freeware version of iPad game.

It used to be so exciting to think about how to market a business on social media. We would read articles, watch videos, go to conferences, exchange ideas, try things out, and come up with the very best way to reach the people. Just a few years ago, it was exciting to be in the social media marketing world.

Things have changed. Many of my contemporaries who have been working in social media for nearly a decade have talked to me lately about how it’s all going downhill, how organic reach is gone and that the pay-to-play model has ruined the industry. They say things like “money makes the crap float to the top” or “there’s nothing creative about paying for exposure.” I agree with them during these conversations, not because I believe what they are saying, but because I’ve found that the exact opposite is true. I’m just trying to avoid an argument.

The reality is that the death of organic reach on social media sites is the best thing that could happen to creative social media marketers. Does it mean that some of the bottom line dollars must be spent in order to get the content the exposure it needs? Yes. Does it also mean that the crap that once filled news feeds across sites like Facebook have been yanked in favor of a proper mix of profile posts with a sprinkling of important, targeted, and paid-for exclusive posts? Absolutely.

It was once pretty futile. Sure, a few posts could get some pretty good exposure, reach, likes, retweets, shares, +1s, or whatever, but there were times when the best content didn’t reach the audience at the degree it deserved. Relying on organic when organic was still an option was a poor strategy. Now that there needs to be a budget (a very small budget, mind you), the potential exposure for high-quality content has actually increased due to the shift in need towards social media advertising.

Facebook and Twitter are the two obvious choices for embracing the paid model and in both cases, the shift was a very positive thing. Our messages can’t get muscled out by the big players just because they’re more popular. Paying to get the attention to the best content or most important posts is a sure-fire way to make certain that the message reaches the right people every time.

The thought that it killed creativity is ludicrous as well. In fact, the dollars attached to the campaigns mean that more care must be put into them. Nobody wants to waste money, so embracing a higher standard of post quality is now at top of mind. As much as we’d all like to think that we were putting out incredible content every time before, the reality is that everyone has days where they’re going through the motions. It’s on those days that a free post can slip through that is terrible. With the paid model, we must pay more attention. It’s better for everyone involved.

We all got suckered into it. We didn’t want to pay for it and for many of us, the reason that we got into this game in the first place was because we could gain exposure for our own pages or our clients’ pages by being good at the game. The paid model doesn’t change that if you really think about it. By paying, we are more invested and will perform better across the board. It’s part of human nature.

They got us to try it. In many ways, it’s like the freeware games that we download that try to get us hooked so we’ll pay for the full version. We got addicted to this world of social media marketing and now we can’t get out of it. Thankfully, the shift is starting to weed out those who are ineffective at taking advantage of what’s given to us all. If you’re not willing to pay to play this game, you should probably find another. Organic reach is dead on social media. Perhaps getting better organic search rankings is better suited for those who can’t play in social media anymore.

In October, 2013, I posted a controversial article about the differences between responsive and adaptive websites and came to the conclusion that, at that time, properly coded adaptive websites were performing better than responsive websites in the automotive arena. I stand by that assertion as long as the timestamp is attached. In other words, adaptive was better in the automotive industry than responsive in October, 2013.

Today, I am happily reversing my opinion. The industry has caught up. There are a handful of companies in our space that have not only improved on the earlier iterations that I did not like but who have taken their responsive sites beyond the adaptive sites that were performing phenomenally well. It's not that adaptive sites are bad or that they've fallen off at all. Today, the responsive sites (and the numbers attached to their results for dealers) have surpassed their adaptive counterparts.

The real difference in the platforms that I have seen launched in recent months compared to the original batch of automotive responsive website designers is that they seem to have followed (coincidentally, I'm sure) a different assertion I made a week after the original post that dealers and their vendors should build websites for mobile first. Mobile is today. It's getting bigger tomorrow.

Responsive websites that are built to accommodate the demands and limitations of mobile devices do not lose out on desktop functionality. If anything, today's savvy buyer has grown accustomed to a more mobile experience on their desktops and appreciate the simplicity that such design brings to the table.

I am dying to name some of the companies that I have looked at over the last few months that have impressed me with their designs and website management tools, but now is not the time. There are five strong responsive design firms that have impressed the heck out of me lately. Two are well known. Two are less known. One is pretty much unknown in the industry. I won't name them because I have yet to do a comprehensive review of everyone's platform. Considering that there are about 50 players in the automotive website arena, it's likely that I will never make it through them all.

In lieu of recommendations or direct endorsements, I'll keep it simple and show you what you should be considering...

• Speed and User Experience: While I have never been big on "quality test" sites that spit out a score about how good your website is, Google has a pretty good one out there with their PageSpeed Insights. The desktop component isn't a huge deal but look at both numbers in mobile - Speed and User Experience. Shoot for a speed over 50 as a bare minimum and the UX should be high, preferably over 90.
• Mobile-Only Functionality: One of the arguments that adaptive website providers make is that you can't put mobile functionality such as "Click to Call" or GPS-enabled navigation on responsive sites. This isn't true, though most of the responsive sites that I have seen do not take advantage of this. You can have that sort of unique functionality appear on your responsive sites when they are on a mobile screen and have them not available on a desktop. If you're considering responsive, ask your vendor if this is the case for their sites.
• Morphing Buttons: Many of the buttons on desktop websites are square. This doesn't lend to an effective mobile translation most of the times because they are too big to see on a single mobile screen. When a responsive website is rendered on a small screen, those large buttons should "morph" into mobile-friendlier buttons, preferably long rectangles that are still big enough for those of us with fat fingers.
• Intelligent Navigation Bars: Just like with the buttons, the navigation bars at the top that are so easy to use on desktop often become a challenge on mobile devices. Most responsive websites stack the navigation options when viewed on a small screen. This is a mistake. Instead, there should be a transition to a drop-down menu for the mobile experience. It should be at the top right and be easy to push for us fat-fingered-folks.
• Remove of "Extras": Even though we'd like to think that everything on our website is of vital importance to our visitors, there are always "fillers" that make sense on desktops but not on mobile. For example, that scrolling display of all of your vehicle types (you know, the one that gets somewhere south of 20 clicks per month) should not be taking up space on mobile. It' fine for desktops but make for a bad mobile experience. Remember, mobile is about getting to the point.

There are plenty of other things that I could go into regarding what to look for in a responsive website design, but I'll leave it off where it is and add a single closing thought: a great adaptive website is still better than a good (or bad) responsive website. Let the numbers guide you in your decision. It's about getting leads and driving more people to your inventory both online and offline. Make sure that the experience they're receiving in their mobile exploration of your website is better than any of your competitors. It makes a difference.

Inbound links still matter. Despite what you may here from SEO gurus around our industry, the power of high-quality, relevant, and natural inbound links to a dealer's website is still apparent. Google's Matt Cutts acknowledged that in the long run, this may not be the case.

That day, however, is not today.

Google is reportedly in the middle of a 10-year plan to discount links from the search algorithm. The best guess is that they're at about year 5 of this plan, which means that we still have another half-decade to make the adjustment. Many of us already are, but that does not mean that links should not be a part of the overall strategy.

Earn them. Use them appropriately. Avoid anything spammy or unnatural. Focus on incredible content that can get people to link to you rather than schemes or techniques for building them. That's what we do. That's what you should be doing as well.

Here's the video from Cutts answering the question recently about inbound links.

I really don't know who I'm going to offend on this one. We've been researching so many vendors over the last couple of months that work with chat, lead-gen widgets, and website platforms themselves that we haven't taken the time to explore PPC vendors. Maybe that's why I was blindsided to find out that there are at least two vendors out there charging 20% and one that we found who is charging 25%.

Is it me or is this insane? We'll put aside the 25% vendor for now. I'm hopeful that it's some sort of accounting mistake or something. Focusing on the 20% charge, it really bugs me that this may be more common than I ever knew. I've always hung around the organic side of search, so PPC hasn't been a focus. With that said, I've managed dozens of PPC campaigns over the years and I could never imagine charging anything other than a flat fee.

To me (and again, I might be on the wrong side of this argument and would be very open to some education on this one), if a dealership is spending $10,000 per month on their PPC, $2,000 of it going to management seems high. If the software is driving the bidding and the feeds are generating the dynamic ads, wouldn't it seem that very little manual effort and development costs are going into the service on a monthly basis?

I've always been a fan of flat fee PPC management because of transparency. I want to be able to recommend to a dealer that they raise their budget without them wondering if I'm just trying to make more money and I want to be able to recommend that they reduce their budget without reducing my service fee. To me, adjusting a budget is a matter of changing a number or two in the backend and I cannot justify charging hundreds of dollars more per month for clicking a few buttons.

Here's the math:

• 20% service fee
• $10,000 per month initial budget
• Dealer wants to raise to a $12,000 per month budget
• Vendor clicks a few buttons, adjust some daily budgets
• Additional monthly cost for clicking those buttons: $400/month
• Yes, that's $4,800 a year for 5-10 minutes of effort

I'll say it again. I'm willing to hear why I'm wrong. I'd love to see the additional monthly effort that goes into a bigger budget. If that's not the case, I'm open to hearing why the cost is justified. If there are vendors out there charging a lower percentage or a flat fee that dealers (or vendors) are willing to recommend, I'd love to hear about those as well.

Someone, please set me straight on this issue. It's bugging me.

Science rules in digital marketing.

Social media is a place of vanity. Those of us who use social media often get to see flattering images of just about everything - people, places, food, cars, whatever. Have you ever seen a picture of a friend posted as their new profile picture and thought, "Wow, that's a good picture of them."

One might believe that the same holds true for automotive ads. On websites, it has been widely accepted that real pictures of inventory work better than stock photos, but on social media we have access to the gorgeous pictures that are supplied by the OEMs. Will pretty advertising pictures outperform pictures of live inventory on ads that are sending traffic to the vehicle details pages and search results pages?

We have done a ton of A/B testing over the past few months and we have pretty compelling data, but I want to get the opinion of the community here before posting those results. What do you think?

Here are some of the criteria for a test we ran for a Hyundai client:

• All ad copy had the same titles, status text, and link description
• The ads linked to the search results page for new Hyundai vehicles
• They were targeted at intenders - people within driving distance to the dealership who had indicated they intend to buy a new Hyundai in the next 180 days
• The only difference was the image

We ran two concurrent campaigns for 1 month. One had beautiful images pulled from the OEM. The other had live inventory images. Here are samples with the branding omitted:

Which type do you think got more clicks to the dealer's website?

A good social media advertising campaign (or any marketing campaign at all, for that matter) should be guided by science. Testing, monitoring, adjusting, and testing again are the cornerstones of a good marketing strategy.

Much of what we do in the car business comes with assumptions. We do things that we have known from past experience to be successful. Sometimes, we have to take those assumptions and adjust them to modern sentiment, trends, and technologies. Other times we have to take those assumptions and throw them out the window.

Below are 6 images. These images were built to plug into a single Facebook advertising campaign designed to drive traffic to the website. The wording of the ad was the same across the board. The budget was a strong one and the activity was left in the hands of the Facebook algorithm to serve the ads based upon activity and popularity.

Look at the images and come to a conclusion in your mind which one yielded the most clicks to the website. The orange section represents where the logo is. Keep in mind that the wording of the ad was generally geared towards Chevrolet - no model indicators were used in the ad other than the image. Given this limited amount of information, which do you think performed the best and yielded the most clicks to the inventory for the dealership?

1. Red Camaro

2. Tahoe

3. Black Camaro

4. Keys

5. Silverado

6. Corvette

Think you have the right answer? I'll tell you up front - it wasn't even close. The ad that performed the best had more than double the click-thru rate in the first few hours. After it started going, it ended up with more than 3 times the clicks of all of the other images combined.

If you have an answer, like this post and comment with which one you think performed the best in the ads. One name will be drawn from the correct answers before the end of the month. If you're a dealer, you'll get a cool prize in the form of some sort of service from Dealer Authority. If you're a vendor, we'll reward you with a contextual followed link to your website from a PageRank 5 site (great for SEO, and if a dealer wins and would prefer that, they can take it instead).

Who's up for the challenge?

One of the most amazing parts of my job is spending time reading, watching, and testing the practices of others. It's conceivable that the true secret to my success over the years has less to do with creativity and more to do with listening and deciphering. You have to listen to the channels like Google and Facebook. You have to listen to your customers. You have to listen to your customers' customers (if you're an agency like me).

The annoying part of my job is sifting through the recycled techniques and reinvented terminology that surrounds so many marketing practices. In most cases, it's the same old things repackaged into a different form or applied from a different angle. Those are valuable, but not gamechanging. Still, it's important to go through them all in order to find the hidden or not-so-hidden gems that arise. The best practices I've found over the years haven't been on the pages of Mashable, Search Engine Watch, or Social Media Today. The real winners have come from some of the least likely sources.

With all of that out of the way, let's get to the point. There are three types of marketing. Despite all of the various names - push and pull marketing, social media marketing, gravitational marketing, search marketing, influence marketing, content marketing - the easiest and arguably most pure way of looking at it is to tackle everything from a perspective of venue and intent. Where are the people going and what are they doing when they get there? It's important for me as well as business owners to look at it from this perspective because the collision of the various marketing types is forcing a holistic marketing model to outperform niche marketing techniques or specialized strategies.

In other words, if you look at venue and intent, you can craft your overall marketing strategy much more easily. We look at it as following the quest - what are they doing, why are thy doing it, and how can we be there to help them choose our clients. When people buy your products, they are fulfilling a quest. No, they're not slaying an actual dragon, but if they're on a quest to buy a car, then your dealership selling them a car is the culmination of that particular quest.

Here are the three types of marketing for 2014 (well, early 2014 at least - it changes so quickly) that we like to tackle:

Fulfilling the Quest

This is the easiest to understand and often the hardest to achieve because of the simplicity of purpose. Everyone knows that if someone is interested in buying a car, they're probably going to go to Google, Bing, or one of the various classified sites to start looking. They might go to review sites and OEM sites as well, but for the most part they're ready to seek the fulfillment of their quest, they're going to try to look for cars.

Search engine marketing of all types, whether it's SEO or PPC, gives you the opportunity to drive them to your website so they may fulfill their quest. They aren't searching for Honda dealers to have fun. They have a purpose. They're in buying mode. This is where you have to be in order to help them fulfill their quest.

Renewing the Quest

More businesses are starting to do this. Many of them tried to do it in 2009-2012 and failed miserably. Part of it was because the venues such as Facebook, banner advertisements, retargeting, and other forms of "passive" marketing arenas weren't developed to the point that they are today.

Now, the goals have come full-circle thanks to the overall availability of the internet. Mobile devices have made checking social media sites and reading websites the common activity when there are no activities to do. As people ride a bus, wait in line at the bank, or even perform other mundane activities like watching television, they are also surfing the internet. They aren't going to Facebook to buy things, but they're open to the concept. They're open to having their quest renewed.

When they go to Fox News to see what's going on and the retargeting ad pops up in front of them, they are reminded that they are still on a quest even if they aren't actively on it at that point. When the business they visited last week pops up on their Facebook news feed, they get that reiteration that they still need to buy something. It might take a dozen instances of seeing a brand and its message before they actually click through, but the statistics are showing that it's working. Not every sale is made through Google. In fact, some of the most important and actionable clicks come through other venues when they're not in active buying mode.

Creating the Quest

Of the three, this is the one that's ignored the most. It's the hardest to do and the least rewarding when not done right. However, it can be the most rewarding when companies are able to make it sing. This is one that we focus on in particular because in our industry, nobody is doing it right.

In many ways it's like good old fashioned advertising. No, it's not like the commercials that we see on television today. Think along the lines of the early days of television when brands were built by establishing a problem that people will see in the normal course of their day and then having that problem solved either in the middle of the initial marketing effort or after further research.

The reason that it's so hard today is because of attention span. We have seconds instead of minutes to get the message out through most advertising and marketing venues. There's no longer time to tell a story...

...or is there?

The art of creating the quest is about putting the right content on the right venues that will reach people and establish a need whether they're in the market right now or not. With this particular article already breaking the 1,000-word mark, there's not enough time to go into it in detail. We'll do that next time. Instead, watch the following video that shows two commercials that worked well in their day. Today, having a minute-long television commercial isn't practical for most businesses, but taking advantage of the various channels online to accomplish the same goal and better is something that we know will move the needle. It's hard. That's the point. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

More on that next time. For now, here's the video:

If you've participated in automotive internet marketing for long enough, you've very likely heard the concept that "content is King." It was in play back in the days when I started researching search engine optimization all those years ago and it never really stopped. There was a dirty little secret that few of us in the SEO community ever mentioned, but it's been safe to say it for a little over a year now.

Content wasn't really king. It was important, but it wasn't king - not by a long shot.

When I started at TK Carsites in 2007, I wanted to prove that point. I was given a single website that belonged to the company that we wanted to rank for the important "used cars" keywords. They had a gameplan that included creating pages for every major metro in the country, populating them with tons of unique content, and playing the game the way that it's supposed to be played. I told them to hold off for a while. This was an opportunity to do some testing.

We didn't add the content... nothing. The homepage was flash and had three words in the title tag - two of them being "Used Cars". I then went through an extremely aggressive link-building process and started attacking dozens of cities. In less than two months, we were ranked in the top 3 for over 30 major metros and #1 for a dozen. These weren't easy keywords. "Baltimore Used Cars". "Dallas Used Cars". "New York City Used Cars". We Google-bombed the site and it paid off. Sadly, we didn't develop the site very much after that, but the point was made.

Fast forward about a year and we started recognizing that Google was changing the game. I was certain that they were heading towards a set of quality-control mechanisms that would make the spammy techniques obsolete. We started shifting towards a content model that included high-value sites, blogs, and guest posting. We still used some of the lesser link-building styles such as directory submissions, but we stopped all forms of footer/sidebar/signature link building. If it could be done in bulk, we weren't going to use it. Google was catching on. I was sure of it.

2009 came and went. No major change. Content was a little more important, but link-building still ruled. In fact, our high-touch, high-maintenance technique was working but not much better than the spammy techniques some were using that we had long-abandoned.

2010 - same thing. I was getting worried. I was sure Google was close. They had to be. Unfortunately, I was getting a little pressure from the SEO team because they were seeing that the techniques that I assured were evil were still working.

2011 - Panda. YAAAAY! No, wait. It didn't address the links. The spammy techniques were still working and my expensive strategy was having trouble fighting off the bulk players.

Then it happened. Penguin. April 24, 2012. The day that I thought would be coming in 2008 or 2009 finally arrived and all of the things I had hoped for came true. Some of our competitors fell of the map, Death-Star-style... "as if millions of SEO's cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

Today, the strategy, a content- and quality-based strategy, is alive and well. Finally.

So what was the point of all that? Today, content truly IS king, but not in the way that most perceive it. The reason that I built a new company that focuses solely on content, search, and social is that the three are now part of the same digital marketing strategy. You cannot do well with any one of them without doing well at the other two. Content is king because the quality necessary for pure link earning and social media marketing is finally bridging the gap. Unfortunately, that's bad news for the vast majority of dealers because the boilerplate content that populates so many dealer websites is hurting you. Chances are you're not really feeling it because you've never experienced the difference; if nearly everyone is doing it wrong, then "bad" is actually average.

Here is a good infographic that demonstrates many of the connections that are associated with content as part of SEO and thus part of the holistic digital marketing strategy, via automotiveseo.org. Enjoy!

It's easy for us to take the high road and call it abysmal to utilize the strategy demonstrated below. We would never do it to two dealers, let alone dozens. We also understand the need to make a solution scalable for the sake of profits as we have worked for companies that need to scale to serve hundreds or thousands of dealers. With that said, it is still atrocious and should stop immediately. This gives quality automotive social media marketing companies a bad name when they pull this sort of stuff.

When Brian West from @FusionZONE Automotive, Inc. showed this to me today, I begged him to let me expose it. He cordially allowed me and now I can't really say much about it without spewing more vitriol than I'm used to spewing.

The justification that I've heard for this type of activity is that nobody will like more than one dealership on Facebook. This is a naive statement, especially considering the rise of the pay-to-play social media model, the fact that they're posted at the same time, and sheer silliness of the question itself. Some of the stores for which the question was posted were in south Florida on a day when it was 75 degrees.

Social media is about creating a channel of communication between the dealership and local people. It's about posting relevant messages and exposing those messages to potential customers. It's about participating in the community that is comprised of the very people who can and should be buying cars. To auto-post using an automated, push-button strategy is absolutely worthless.

Here's the post itself. Looking at the dozens of dealers that posted this content led me to realize that this wasn't a mistake. It wasn't a one-off instance. Every piece of content is posted across the board.

This infuriates me. It isn't just lazy and ridiculous. It's sad that dealers are actually paying for this to happen. It doesn't have to be this way.

Over the last couple of months, I've been researching reputation management companies in and out of the automotive industry. On one hand, I found a couple of shining stars that stood out from the competition. On the other hand, they were only the best but were still missing the boat when it comes to the true potential of what reputation "management" should be.

I've been told that my posts are too long, particularly when I'm in rant-mode, so I'll keep this as brief as possible. Car dealers deserve better. The industry started getting flooded with reputation management services a few years ago and they all migrated to the same basic premise: solicit reviews through emails. While this in itself isn't a bad thing (and I'd debate anyone who thinks it is a bad thing, including anyone at Yelp), it's only a small piece of the puzzle. For a true reputation management solution to work, it needs to have an holistic understanding of how to utilize the components of online reputation as well as a grasp of how to turn a quality reputation into an amazing marketing tool.

Again, I'll try to keep this brief. It will be challenging.

More than Defensive

We've learned that defense wins championships. However, the concept that reputation management is about keeping your review star-ratings high is like saying that a car is about having a place to sit while you travel. Your reputation can do so much more for you than a star-rating just as a car can do so much more for the owner than just act as a moving seat.

The concept of reputation marketing is completely underutilized at best and butchered by some at worst. The first step, getting your star-ratings higher, is good to keep people from dismissing you altogether when searching for you. That part's fine. However, those who click through to the review sites are most likely looking for dirt. They want to know what you've done wrong. They're scanning beyond the good reviews and going straight to the bad ones.

A strong reputation management solution should go on the offensive. Expose the great reviews. When someone is out there talking about how they just bought their fifth vehicle in the last decade from your dealership, your reputation management company should be getting that out to as many people as possible. No, that doesn't mean an automated feed from the review site to your Facebook page that will end up getting seen by 50 people in their news feed and actually read by somewhere between zero and one of them. It takes more effort than that and I haven't seen anyone doing it properly yet at the vendor level.

The Search Component

How in the world has nearly every reputation management firm in the automotive industry missed the tremendous benefits (and potential pitfalls) of utilizing reputation for search engine optimization? When I was at the SXSW convention last year, Google pretty much declared that online reputation and review sites would play a role in organic rankings as well as PPC exposure, yet I haven't heard a peep about it other than a mention on another site noting that Google had taken down an Adwords account because the dealership had a bad reputation.

The two companies that had the best solution that I reviewed both touched on the benefits of reputation from a search perspective but neither have taken the appropriate actions to put together a working strategy, yet. Hopefully, that will be coming, but most in the industry haven't even made the connection despite the clear message from Google.

Botching Social Media

I'm going to keep this part extremely short because I'll start spitting and foaming at the mouth if I talk about it too long. The absolute butchering of dealership social media pages and profiles by reputation management companies and their 2008 social media strategies makes me insane. I want to grab them by the shoulders and force them to listen to reason.

Just because reputation management and social media have a connection doesn't make a RepMan consultant a social media expert. Cars and planes are similar - they're vehicles that get people from point A to point B - but that doesn't mean that having a driver's license gives you the skills to fly a 747. The potential synergies between social media marketing and reputation management are clear, but so far I've seen nothing that even remotely approaches a cohesive and intelligent plan of attack to make them sing in harmony. It's like they took peanut butter, jelly, and bread, tossed them all in a blender and said, "Look, I made a PBJ!"

(wiping foam from mouth now)

Sorry for the Rant

Okay. I'm done. It's been bugging me since NADA and after seeing what I saw last night I had to get it out there. At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of a dealership to train employees on the art of treating customers well. Those of us who have been on the retail side of the car business know that you'll have customers who will burn you no matter how hard you try to please them, but their frequency can be minimized by an appropriate company culture and a well-trained staff.

That's the onus of the dealer. On the vendor side, I'm making it a personal mission to educate reputation management companies on the proper way to position this potentially powerful marketing tool. We deserve better. You deserve better.